I just came back from an inspiring and informative trip to Saarbrücken. I gave a talk in the FEAST series about tagging tense, aspect, modality and polarity in Oceanic languages. Here are my slides for the talk.
Category: Publications
The future is what the universe wants
There was a remarkable small workshop on imperatives at ZAS last week that I was happy to be part of. It was a welcome opportunity to take up my work on potential mood directives in Daakaka and their relations to future assertions and embedded clauses. You can see my slides here.
Towards an ontology of modal flavours
I’m still feeling warm and fuzzy from the wonderful workshop we had last week at the DGfS conference about modal flavours. The idea for this workshop had formed last year during the SIAS summer institute on the investigation of linguistic meaning, together with Ryan Bochnak and Anne Mucha. We were very happy to win Aynat Rubinstein as our invited speaker and get some excellent submissions from various subfields of linguistics. We gave an overview of background motivations and common themes of the talks in our introduction.
Out now: Indefinites in Daakaka (Vanuatu)
There are two indefinite articles in the Oceanic language Daakaka, TUSWA and SWA. Like weak NPIs or unspecific indefinites in many other languages, TUSWA is excluded from positive assertions about the episodic past or present. In this paper, I try to locate them within the cross-linguistic space of indefinites and NPIs and sketch out an approach to account for their differences.
Read the full paper here.
Upcoming talk at Cologne
I’m excited to visit Cologne again, this time for a talk on an Oceanic perspective on tense and modality. If you’re in the area, you’ll find the details here.
Alienability as control — now out in print
I was fortunate to be invited as a contributor to a special edition of Lingua (in pre-Glossa times) on possession. My article on “Alienability as control” is now out in print at long last and, alas, behind a paywall. You can contact me to get the manuscript.
Poster for Sinn und Bedeutung 2016
I’m excited about the upcoming Sinn und Bedeutung conference in Edinburgh. The program looks very promising and I’ll have an opportunity to discuss some of my latest thoughts on the Daakaka distal and modal semantics more generally. If you can’t come but would like to see my poster, here it is.
It was created with XeLaTeX, graphics with Inkscape, maps with GMT.